In today's global economy, teams of users may be distributed around the world. For example, one team member might be located in Oregon, another in Australia, a third in Israel, and a fourth in Russia. That team members may be scattered around the world introduces new complications into coordinating team efforts.
The most obvious complication is that team members may not sit down together in a single room without extensive traveling. Although theoretically possible for occasional use, arranging for all team members to travel to a single location to meet is often expensive, in money and especially in time. The cost of arranging travel for each team member may be prohibitive, and the time needed for travel and to allow the team members to acclimate to the local time zone may often run into days. For projects with relatively short deadlines, the time cost involved in travel may often be the more prohibitive factor against travel.
But because the earth is divided into multiple time zones, coordinating video-or tele-conferencing may be just as complex. For example, there is a 10-hour time difference between the Oregon and Israel. When it is 9:00 AM in Oregon, it is 7:00 PM in Israel. Factor in team members in other parts of the world, and it may be impossible to find a time to hold the meeting that is convenient to everyone's work schedule. As a result, some participants are forced to conference in to meetings at very awkward times.
The physical separation of team members has other affects beyond the inconvenience of scheduling meetings. This is isolating: limiting interaction to e-mail and telephone conversations does not let team members get to know one another. This lack of knowledge about other team members may have an impact on individual and team performance, which costs money. It is important the team members know one another: for example, their strengths and weaknesses, their work habits, and their culture.
Further complicating everything is that users are often working on more than one project at a time. Studies have shown that, on average, users participate in 3-10 projects at one time. Even if it is possible for a user to interact with team members of one project, such interaction comes at the expense of interaction with team members on other projects.
Some tools exist to attempt to address the problem of dispersed team members. For example, Instant messaging tools provide ways to quickly communicate one user to another. Microsoft® offers several software products, including SharePoint™, Office, and NetMeeting®. SharePoint is a document management system. It allows members of a team to share documents and other information. But SharePoint provides no way to connect multiple projects. For example, if a user wants to share a document across three different projects, the user has to connect to each project individually and add the documents to the project. In addition, the copies of the documents are not connected. SharePoint is also a hierarchical software package: using SharePoint requires working from the “top” of the software down to the desired functionality. Microsoft Office is a set of software programs, including Word, Excel, and Outlook® among others, for performing various tasks. And Microsoft NetMeeting® is software that provides for network conferencing. (Microsoft, SharePoint, Outlook, and NetMeeting are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.)
Groove Networks®, Inc. offers software that allows real-time peer-to-peer interaction. Groove Networks software allows users to set up groups, but is otherwise outside not workflow oriented. Groove Networks software provides no interoperability, and no structure.
Documentum, Inc. offers eRoom, which is a document management system, but it is little more than a document drop. eRoom does not provide for teamwork or multiple teams, and any functionality other than document management is an add-on to the basic eRoom software. (Documentum and eRoom are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Documentum, Inc.)
Finally, ThinkDesk™ by Outhink, Inc., is a workflow tool. It acknowledges that users are sometimes involved in multiple projects simultaneously, and offers a drag-and-drop interface. But it does not allow users to see all of their projects at once. It does not allow users to be able to locate other team members, easily schedule and manage meetings, or in general engage in activities that involve the entire team.
As may be seen, all of these solutions are flawed. Some, like instant messaging, Microsoft NetMeeting, and the software offered by Groove Networks, Inc., are dedicated to individual tasks, and do not address the problem as a whole, or are entirely outside the space of the problem. Others, like Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum eRoom, and Outhink ThinkDesk, are designed around a single core strength of the business offering the product. The other functionalities have poor designs and do not integrate well with the core product. Microsoft Office includes several different software programs, all of which were designed and implemented separately, without any concern for integration. Although offered now as a suite and capable of exchanging information between the individual software programs, the individual software programs were not originally designed to work together. Offering the individual software programs as a suite required creating “glue code” to allow them to work together. Except for Outhink ThinkDesk, none of these solutions acknowledges that users may be working on multiple projects simultaneously. And even Outhink ThinkDesk, while acknowledging the possibility of multiple projects, does not let users work in all projects simultaneously.
As an example of the lack of integration, consider the situation where a user receives an e-mail message about a meeting. In Microsoft Outlook, if the user drags the e-mail message onto the calendar tool, Microsoft Outlook will obligingly open a new appointment, for the meeting. But no fields of the new appointment are filled in: the user has to manually search the message to find the relevant information and manually schedule the meeting.
In fairness to Microsoft Outlook, the program does offer a way to e-mail an appointment so that, upon acceptance by the recipient, the appointment is completely scheduled in the recipient's calendar. But to send the appointment requires digging through menus within the program in a non-intuitive manner for a rather buried feature.
In addition, when a user is working with one tool, it completely dominates the user's attention. The user has no easy way to access other tools without completely diverting attention away from the dominant tool. The user also has no way to find out about actions occurring on other projects.
These products all assume that a user works on only one project at a time. The products offer no easy way to switch between projects, or even recognize that a user might be involved in more than one project.
Finally, these products, to the limited extent that they offer any sort of integration, are limited to integration n with their own tools. There is no way for these products to interact properly with software written by others, or running on a different hardware architecture.